The Postmistress of Paris(78)

She handed him her passport and the French transit visa that allowed her to move about the free zone.

“And the child’s papers?”

“Pétain isn’t to visit Marseille until Tuesday,” Nanée said. “It’s only Friday.”

“It will be Saturday when the train arrives,” the man said. “We must take precautions. I’m sure you will understand. The lengths these troublemakers go to. An anarchist put a bomb in an underpass near la Pomme in hopes of killing the Prince of Wales.”

Nanée tried to hide her alarm: La Pomme was where Villa Air-Bel was. “Was nobody hurt?”

The man smiled indulgently. “I’m afraid the Prince of Wales has not visited France lately. This was perhaps eight years ago.”

“I see.” She laughed more easily than she felt, wondering what an attempted bombing nearly a decade ago could have to do with anything. “Well, you don’t imagine a five-year-old girl will blow up a bridge, I hope!”

“Truly, we must check everyone,” he apologized.

She fetched Luki’s passport, tamping back the temptation to ask how an anarchist attack years ago could possibly cause him to now need to confirm a child’s passport, far too aware that Luki had no French transit visa.

He gave the passport a cursory glance and handed it back. “I apologize that you may be bothered once or twice again on the journey.”

Nanée wondered how many stops there would be along the way, how many document checks, really. She would have to order coffee to keep herself awake. She couldn’t afford to be caught off guard along the way. But at least they were out of occupied France, with only Frenchmen now to be fooled or bribed.

“How long we will be delayed?” she asked.

The man shrugged. “You will arrive when you arrive, and not a moment earlier.”

Nanée snuggled again with Luki, who’d turned the book’s pages to an illustration of two jaguars. In the background, a dark-skinned boy held a baby jaguar by the back of its neck as a white man pointed a rifle at the poor thing.

“What are they doing to the baby?” Luki asked.

Nanée flipped pages, looking for a gentler illustration, only to come upon a jaguar on his back. Was he dead?

“That man is a bad man,” Luki said.

On the facing page, a man stripped to the waist and tied to a tree was being caned.

Nanée flipped pages more quickly, saying, “Now where did we leave off?” Perhaps the illustrations made sense in the context of the story, or perhaps she could finish the page and close the book.

Luki stopped her at a drawing of a man with arms tied behind a tree trunk as another man aimed a cat-o’-nine-tails at his bare chest.

“He’s a bad man, so he has to be punished,” Luki said, meaning the man being beaten.

How did you explain to a child that some people were unforgivably cruel? She remembered another illustration in another Pink Library volume, of a woman flogging a child. How terribly proper and yet brutal these books were, all manners and morals, with virtue always triumphant while bad children got the switch. What a beast she must have been as a child, to love them.

“The Germans are bad men,” Luki said. “I’m a German. That’s why I know the words the bad men say. But I’m a girl.”

Nanée nodded, trying to see where her mind was headed.

“Papa is a German.”

“Oh, sweetheart.” Nanée hugged Luki close and kissed the top of her head. “Your papa isn’t a German like that. Your papa is a very good man. He’d never hurt anyone.”

“Even if they were bad men, like in the picture?”

“The bad man here is this one,” Nanée said, pointing to the horrible one wielding the whip. “But Thérèse helps them, so they can’t be hurt anymore.”

Nanée flipped further backward. Why couldn’t this be the Pink Library story with the toy store and the beautiful rocking horse?

She glanced out the window, wishing the train would set out before some bad man somewhere changed his mind about letting them go.

She read on, watching out the window too and thinking of the replica of that rocking horse her father had had made for her one Christmas. She’d been too big for it, really, even then. Would home be easier to negotiate now, without Daddy there to disappoint? But it would be impossible to bear Misha in his place.

She turned to the next, mercifully illustration-free page, hoping Luki might fall asleep before they got much further.

“Were the men after we left the castle good men, even though they said the German words?” Luki looked to Nanée with her big dark eyes, which had seen so much more than a five-year-old ought to.

“I don’t know,” Nanée admitted. Had the German soldiers known they were escaping and let them go?

“They gave me candy. Sister Therese used to give me candy. Her name is the same as the girl in the story.”

“It is.”

“Sister Therese is a good person.”

“Yes.”

“She isn’t German.”

“No.”

“Reverend Mother is a good person.”

“Very good.”

“The Lady Mary is good even though she’s stone.”

Nanée wasn’t sure how Edouard would feel about his daughter’s infatuation with the Christ mother he didn’t believe in. Or did he? Nanée wasn’t even sure what she believed herself. Faith. What did the word mean? Her faith was in the selflessness of people like the nuns, the hay wagon driver, the caretaker’s family, Simone Menier. People like Miriam, T and Danny, Varian, Gussie, and Maurice.